Bestseller or Prestige? Willa Cather, cont

Plus: ALA

Here is my last newsletter on the process of designing new covers for new Belt books.

I will be in Philadelphia for the upcoming ALA conference. Will you be there and want to say hi? Shoot me an email.

My nonfiction (which we need more of!) proposal course starts July 7.

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Months ago, I wrote a newsletter on the first half of Willa Cather’s career as an author. Below is the second half, which I finally finished after reading far too much of discourse (with which I largely disagree) about literary fiction, making money, bestseller lists, how things used to be etc.

Here is the summary from that first post:

Willa Cather was famous in her lifetime. She was recognized on the street; reporters tracked down her otherwise private address and shouted questions through locked doors. When her last novel was published in 1941, it sold 16,000 copies in the first few weeks, and Book of the Month Club ordered a separate printing of 200,000. Houghton Mifflin had already issued a deluxe twelve volume deluxe edition of her collected works.

Today, Cather remains a well-known, canonized writer whose novels are often assigned in both high schools and colleges (a rare feat), analyzed by scholars, and quoted in booktok videos.

To some extents, Cather ran the table of #writergoals: she sold a lot of copies, made a lot of money on her books, was esteemed and lauded during her day, and remains so long after her death. But there is a significant rift hidden in this precis: the works for which she is known today were not the ones that made her significant money during her lifetime, and the ones which did throw off huge royalties are no longer known or much read, nor were they critically acclaimed when initially published. There are broadly two Cathers: the one who wrote O Pioneers! And My Antonia, for which she is known, read, and written about today but did not make her famous or rich, and the Cather of One of Ours and Sapphira and the Slave Girl, which are largely forgotten, but provided her with money, awards, and fame.

Go here to read the rest of part one.

Her next novel was Song of the Lark, which she wrongly predicted would sell 30,000 copies, but was neither a critical nor financial success. She was still working with her editor Ferris Greenslet, who found the manuscript too long and disconnected. Cather agreed, but didn’t make Greenslet’s suggested changes. The book was not a success: Heinemann, her British publisher, turned it down, it didn’t receive great reviews, and it certainly did not sell as Cather had hoped, even though Cather was very involved in the marketing and promotion of the book, wriring copy for ads, and suggesting where ads should be placed (women’s colleges). She eventually realized she should have listened to Greenslet’s advice, but she was unhappy with how Houghton Mifflin handled the novel and its launch, particularly after the press billed her for excess contributions she made to the proof.

Cather’s agent was selling her stories to magazines, money which helped her work on her next novel, My Antonia. She wrote the first part quickly, and wondered what the deadline might be to make fall 1917 publication, but it would take her much longer than that to finish it. She would miss that and another deadline, partially because she had to keep selling short stories to earn money. But by June of 1918 she had sent the completed manuscript to Greenslet, who had already edited the early chapters. She continued to push back on proofs, telling the proofreaders they must “allow her to use an occasional subjunctive,” and insisted the commissioned illustrations be placed exactly as she wanted. Houghton Mifflin agreed.

My Antonia was published in September 1918. Sales were good but not exceptional: it sold 5,000 by the end of the year, and 8,000 total by the subsequent September. Then it trickled down to 500 per year, and was out of print for a time in 1920 due to a printer’s strike. But the reviewers adored it, calling it a major work of American fiction.

But then she jumped ship, paritally triggered by Houghton Mifflin’s bill for her proof corrections to My Antonia:

She wrote Greenslet a five-page letter detailing the accumulating grievances and specifically objecting to the charges to corrections. She had been investigating this matter and had found that author’s corrections usually cost a publisher about a dollar an hour in printer’s time. She figured that if her bill were correct Houghton Mifflin must have had one printer working thirty days to correct her gallys. She could not believe this was possible. She also did not believer it was customary for publishers to charge authors they really had faith in. She had seen some of Dreiser’s proofs: his books were practically rewritten after being set in type; yet he never had been charged a cent.” ¹

Other publishers were wooing her, and she was listening. Greenselt attempted to woo her back, offering to spend more on advertising her subsequent books. But Alred Knopf, the then wunderkind of a buzzy new publishing house, offered to reissue her earliest book, The Troll Garden, and won.

Cather permanently jumped from Houghton Mifflin. She would stick with Knopf for all her subsequent books. He would give the finicky author more control, and put more money into selling her books. He would also not publish a novel of hers as close to as critically received as O, Pioneers! and My Antonia.

Once with Knopf, Cather would win the Pulitzer, sell extraordinarily well, and no longer have to worry about money. She became a celebrity (which made her miserable). She would publish many books that were panned by critics. Her career, seen retrospectively, is cleaved in two: the first brought her critical acclaim, a place in the canon, and financial worries. Her second brought her money, fame, bad reviews, and now forgotten novels.

The first novel she worked on with Knopf was a long process, but Cather was finally at a place in her career where the exigencies of money were lessened, her fame secured, and she could take more time with her novels. Claude was the name of her work in progress; Knopf (person) would insist she change it—he didn’t give her that much control—and it would become One of Ours (Belt reissued it in 2019). It took her four years.

The novel received mixed reviews. Mencken hated it. Of the World War I novel he wrote: “What spoils the story is simply that a year or so ago a yound soldier named John Dos Passos printed a novel called Three Soldiers. Until Three Soldiers is forgotten and fancy achieves the inevitable victory over fact, no war story can be written in the United States without challenging comparison with it.”. Others were more brutal: “There are not more than fifty pages our of the four hundred and fifty-nine which establish any kind of spell. This is a dogged book, and we read it doggedly.” Edmund Wilson called it a “flat failure.” Hemingway was cruel: “Wasn’t that last scene wonderful? Do you know whwere it came fron? The battle scenes in Birth of a Nation. Catherized. Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere. “

But it also made her, at 59, rich and famous. The public liked it, as did the Pulitzer committee, renowned for rewarding the lesser of a great author’s novels.. She sold 16,000 copies in the first month, and it stayed on the bestseller list for so long that Cather would be freed of money worries for the rest of her life. She was in such demand she hired a secretary (Sarah Bloom, who remained with her for the rest of Cather’s life). Cather took the criticism hard, though, and, perhaps combined with mixed messages from thethe awards and sales, was likely depressed for a long time afterwards.

In 1925 she published The Professor’s House, which sold enough for her to buy herself a mink coat. It was serialized in Collier’s before being published. She followed that with My Mortal Enemy, “a novella bulked out by Knopf’s production department into a book”. She would continue to publish novels that were panned by critics and gobbled up by readers. Shadows on the Rock sold 160,000 copies in its first months, and sold more than almost any other book published in 1931. Reviews said “There is no blood in it, no muscle, no bodily emotion…it is commonplace flavored with lavender.” She kept winning prize—the Prix Femina Americaine, an honorary degree from Smith—and getting richer off royalties. Sapphira and The Slave Girl published in 1941 with a 200,000 advance order from the Book of the Month Club. She was so recognizable that she checked into hotels under pseudonyms. She often lied, upon receiving a request, that she would be in Mexico City (she never went to Mexico City).

Cather didn’t love her fame, and became increasingly private as her notoreity grew. It is said then when she walked in New York, she had her companion, Edith Lewis, keep in front of her should there be autograph seekers. She hated being inundated with mail and recognized in public, and resented the time interviews and lectures took from her writing. She turned down Hollywood. In her will, she forbid anyone from ever using her likeness for “dramatization, whether for the purpose of spoken stage presentation or othewise, motion picture, radio broadcasting, television and rights of mechanical reporoduction, whether by means now in existence or which may be hereafter be discovered or perfected.” She did not allow people to show her letters to anyone. She refused to offer her archives to anyone (although she did sell a few of her handwritten manuscripts to collectors in the past). She asked Knopf to destroy final typed versions of her novels.

And as she aged, she began to be seen by younger critics as increasingly irrelevant—elitist, provincial, severed from politics. When her finances took a hit and she sent a story fo Woman’s Home Companion, it was turned down, deemed out of fashion. Cather had become, for the new young literary turks, a crusty remnant of an earlier age.

But she had made a fortune from her novels.

1. This quote is from James Woodress’ Willa Cather: A Literary Life. For research I also used Hermione Lee’s Willa Cather: Double Lives and Benjamin Taylor’s Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather.